Editor,
It is my sincere hope that people who voted for Trump can now understand that he is a dangerous racist, a manipulator of their hopes, a greedy man who loves only money, and a president who, although firing the Nazi Bannon, retains only white people in his cabinet (mostly males) who are determined to dismantle all regulations and programs that help the poor or protect the environment.
They can take courage from the story of German Pastor Martin Niemoller, an early Nazi supporter and anti-Semite. (When learning of Nazi atrocities, he had written, “No honest man or woman in Germany feels responsible for these things. Good Germans took Nazism as a new religion.”)
Niemoller, a submarine commander in WWI, had written a bestseller in 1933 From U-Boat to Pulpit in which he praised the Nazis as bringing about a “national revival.”
Niemoller later renounced the Nazis. His famous words – in many versions depending on whom he was talking to, but the version he preferred was –
“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I did not speak out; As I was not a Communist.
“When they locked up the Social Democrats, I did not speak out; As I was not a Social Democrat.
“When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; As I was not a trade unionist.
“When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; As I was not a Jew.
“When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”
He and his wife visited Dachau in 1945 where he had been imprisoned for eight years for speaking out. At the crematorium, a hand-lettered wooden sign nailed on a tree read, “Here between the years 1933 and 1945, 238,756 human beings were incinerated.”
The Pastor had no answer to that.
T.A. Laughlin